Ordinal indicator


In written languages, an ordinal indicator is a character, or group of characters, following a numeral denoting that it is an ordinal number, rather than a cardinal number. Historically these letters were "elevated terminals", that is to say the last few letters of the full word denoting the ordinal form of the number displayed as a superscript. Probably originating with Latin scribes, the character used vary in different languages.
In English orthography, this corresponds to the suffixes st, nd, rd, th in written ordinals. Also commonly encountered in Romance languages are the superscript or superior masculine ordinal indicator, ', and feminine ordinal indicator, '. In formal typography, the ordinal indicators and are distinguishable from other characters.
The practice of underlined superscripted abbreviations was common in 19th-century writing, and was found in handwritten English until at least the late 19th century.

Usage

In Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Galician, the ordinal indicators and are appended to the numeral depending on whether the grammatical gender is masculine or feminine. The indicator may be given an underline but this is not ubiquitous. In digital typography, this depends on the font: Cambria and Calibri, for example, have underlined ordinal indicators, while most other fonts do not.
Examples of the usage of ordinal indicators in Italian are:
  • 1º, primo; 1ª, prima "first"
  • 2º, secondo; 2ª, seconda "second"
  • 3º, terzo; 3ª, terza "third"
Galician also forms its ordinal numbers this way, while Asturian follows a similar system where is used for the masculine gender, for the feminine gender and for the neuter gender.
In Spanish, using the two final letters of the word as it is spelled is not allowed, except in the cases of primer before singular masculine nouns, which is not abbreviated as 1.º but as 1.er, of tercer before singular masculine nouns, which is not abbreviated as ' but as ', and of compound ordinal numbers ending in primer or tercer. For instance, "twenty-first" is vigésimo primer before a masculine noun, and its abbreviation is 21.er. Since none or these words are shortened before feminine nouns, their correct forms for those cases are primera and . These can be represented as 1.ª and 3.ª. As with other abbreviations in Spanish, the ordinal numbers have a period ".", which is placed before the indicator. Portuguese follows the same method.

Origins

The practice of indicating ordinals with superscript suffixes may originate with the practice of writing a superscript o to indicate a Latin ablative in pre-modern scribal practice. This ablative desinence happened to be frequently combined with ordinal numerals indicating dates.
The usage of terminals in the vernacular languages of Europe derives from Latin usage, as practised by scribes in monasteries and chanceries before writing in the vernacular became established. The terminal letters used depend on the gender of the item to be ordered and the case in which the ordinal adjective is stated, for example primus dies, but primo die, shown as Io or io. As monumental inscriptions often refer to days on which events happened, the ablative case is generally used: Xo with the month stated in the genitive case. Examples:
  • Io die Julii "on the first day of July"
  • Xo decimo
  • XXo vicensimo
  • Lo quinquagesimo
  • Co centesimo
  • Mo ''millesimo''

    Design

The masculine ordinal indicator may be confused with the degree sign , which looks very similar and which is provided on the Italian and Latin American keyboard layouts. It was common in the early days of computers to use the same character for both. The degree sign is a uniform circle and is never underlined. The masculine ordinal indicator is the shape of a lower-case letter, and thus may be oval or elliptical, and may have a varying line thickness.
Ordinal indicators may also be underlined. It is not mandatory in Portugal nor in Brazil, but it is preferred in some fonts to avoid confusion with the degree sign.
Also, the ordinal indicators should be distinguishable from superscript characters. The top of the ordinal indicators must be aligned with the cap height of the font. The alignment of the top of superscripted letters and will depend on the font.
The line thickness of the ordinal indicators is always proportional to the line thickness of the other characters of the font. Many fonts just shrink the characters to draw superscripts.

Encoding

The Romance feminine and masculine ordinal indicators were added to many 8-bit character sets designed to support European languages, such as CP437. In 1985 the ECMA-94 encoding ISO 8859-1 placed them at positions 170 and 186. ISO 8859-1 was incorporated as the first 256 code points of Unicode in 1991. The Unicode characters are thus:
There are superscript versions of the letters and in Unicode; these are different characters and should not be used as ordinal indicators.

Typing

and Spanish keyboard layouts are the only ones on which the characters are directly accessible through a dedicated key: for "º" and for "ª". On other keyboard layouts, these characters are accessible only through a set of keystrokes.

Ordinal dot

In Basque, Serbo-Croatian, Czech, Danish, Estonian, Faroese, Finnish, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Latvian, Norwegian, Slovak, Slovene, Turkish, among other languages, a period or full stop is written after the numeral. In Polish, the period can be omitted if there is no ambiguity whether a given numeral is ordinal or cardinal. The only exceptions are variables in mathematics. Writing out the endings for various cases, as sometimes happens in Czech and Slovak, is considered incorrect and uneducated. Should a full stop follow this dot, it is omitted.
The Serbian standard of Serbo-Croatian uses the dot in role of the ordinal indicator only past Arabic numerals, while Roman numerals are used without a dot.
There is a problem with autocorrection, mobile editors, etc., which often force a capital initial letter in the word following the ordinal numbers.

Other suffixes

English

  • -st is used with numbers ending in 1
  • -nd is used with numbers ending in 2
  • -rd is used with numbers ending in 3
  • As an exception to the above rules, numbers ending with 11, 12, and 13 use -th
  • -th is used for all other numbers.
  • One archaic variant uses a singular -d for numbers ending in 2 or 3
In 19th-century handwriting, these terminals were often elevated, that is to say written as superscripts. With the gradual introduction of the typewriter in the late 19th century, it became common to write them on the baseline in typewritten texts, and this usage even became recommended in certain 20th-century style guides. Thus, the 17th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style states: "The letters in ordinal numbers should not appear as superscripts ", as do the Bluebook and style guides by the Council of Science Editors, Microsoft, and Yahoo. Two problems are that superscripts are used "most often in citations" and are "tiny and hard to read". Some word processors format ordinal indicators as superscripts by default. Style guide author Jack Lynch recommends turning off automatic superscripting of ordinals in Microsoft Word, because "no professionally printed books use superscripts".

French

uses the ordinal indicators er and re for the number 1, depending on gender.
It uses e for higher numbers.
French also uses the indicators d and de for the alternative second ordinal number.
Although regarded as incorrect by typographic standards, longer forms are in wide usage: ère for feminine 1 ), ème for numbers starting at 2, nd and nde for the alternative second ordinal number
These indicators use superscript formatting whenever it is available.

Catalan

The rule in Catalan is to follow the number with the last letter in the singular and the last two letters in the plural. Most numbers follow the pattern exemplified by vint '20', but the first few ordinals are irregular, affecting the abbreviations of the masculine forms. Superscripting is not standard.

Dutch

Unlike other Germanic languages, Dutch is similar to English in this respect: the French layout with used to be popular, but the recent spelling changes now prescribe the suffix ‑e. Optionally ‑ste and ‑de may be used, but this is more complex: 1ste , 2de , 4de , 20ste , etc.

Finnish

In Finnish orthography, when the numeral is followed by its head noun, it is sufficient to write a period or full stop after the numeral: Päädyin kilpailussa 2. sijalle "In the competition, I finished in 2nd place". However, if the head noun is omitted, the ordinal indicator takes the form of a morphological suffix, which is attached to the numeral with a colon. In the nominative case, the suffix is ‑nen for 1 and 2, and ‑s for larger numerals: Minä olin 2:nen, ja veljeni oli 3:s 'I came 2nd, and my brother came 3rd'. This is derived from the endings of the spelled-out ordinal numbers: ensimmäinen, toinen, kolmas, neljäs, viides, kuudes, seitsemäs, etc..
The system becomes rather complicated when the ordinal needs to be inflected, as the ordinal suffix is adjusted according to the case ending: 3:s, 3:nnen, 3:tta, 3:nnessa, 3:nteen, etc.. Even native speakers sometimes find it difficult to exactly identify the ordinal suffix, as its borders with the word stem and the case ending may appear blurred. In such cases, it may be preferable to write the ordinal word entirely with letters and particularly 2:nen is rare even in the nominative case, as it is not significantly shorter than the full word toinen.